Transmutable Work

Is Butter OK?

IBOK was a web site for people with food allergies or special diets. They filled out a food profile and then shared it with waitstaff and dinner hosts so that they got food that didn’t land them in the hospital.

I wrote this short adventure story about alien interstellar travel because I had a trio of characters who needed to get out of my head and because of one fact: Trees build themselves out of the carbon in air.
Meet Elizabeth Stinton (inventor and startup founder), Lester Marcos (resident egghead), and Lieutenant Colonel William Hitchcock (neatly pressed career military man) who along with their trusty sensor cloud, Clytemnestra, are called together by destiny. Well, destiny and a massive beam of coherent light that rebuilt the Mojave Desert.

My team built a system for converting scans of paper documents into structured digital information. In addition to a scalable web infrastructure and an efficient pipeline for large amounts of digital imagery, we used machine learning and crowdsourcing to provide accurate handwriting recognition.

I worked with the founders of a vibrant coworking space in Seattle to create an open source, member logging and billing system which balances their dedication to community and their need to grow beyond manual systems.

6 years, 1 month ago

2038 Solutions

I ran a boutique tech team which turned many napkin sketches into working products. Our projects often included the web, public art, and the occasional airport.

6 years, 3 months ago

San Jose Airport Art Network

I worked with Gorbet Design to develop the open infrastructure underpinning the rotating installation art in the new terminals at the Norman Y. Mineta San Jose International Airport.

NetPositive Browser at Be, Inc

EcmaScript6 radically changes the process of front end development by eliminating awkward code patterns and the need for unwieldy front-end built tools.
I wrote a lightweight, dependency-free alternative for reactive data modeling and user interface development. Compared to Backbone, React, and Ember, PotassiumES is like a breath of fresh air.

Text In Everything (working title)

The Roman Catholic calendar of saints provides us with opportunities to meditate on the lives and works of people chosen by popes. This project provides us with opportunities to meditate on the lives and works of people who have used the tools of science to further our understanding of the universe.

I put together a template for quick "one pager" web apps which allowed devs like myself to go from idea to prototype in an hour or two. It combined Twitter Bootstrap with Backbone.js to provide a styled, interactive web frame without all the fuss of a server back-end or complex deployments.
This project has been mostly replaced by the Skella front end project.

I released the Django project which runs my vanity site, trevor.smith.name, to make it more generally useful for people who aren't me and to use modern materials like Backbone.js and TastyPie.
I'm still running Trullo, but if I had to build it again I'd use Skella.

Backbone.js on Captricity

I used the Backbone.js library to test out some ideas about moving away from server side presentation with templates and towards more dynamic client side code.

6 years, 2 months ago

Trevor F. Smith: Exterior

What started as a private group project to record our experiences in the year 2000 eventually led me to create Trevor F. Smith: Exterior, a public log of my life and projects.

6 years, 2 months ago

Nuclu

I founded Nuclu, a tech startup which provided positive crisis management tools and information to small teams. I shuttered the site and company when I joined Captricity.

6 years, 4 months ago

Agilent Labs Research Project

This research project with Agilent Labs was shielded from public participation by a non-disclosure agreement. That said, you may draw your own conclusions from these two facts: Agilent has a rather large number of networked biotech devices and I have a background in heterogeneous device interoperation stacks.

7 years, 5 months ago

Flounder

A command line driven management system for dynamically scalable Django clusters on Amazon Web Services.

7 years, 10 months ago

The Ogoglio Project

I led the effort to build a free and open platform for an online city for creative collaboration.

9 years, 2 months ago

VLOGS and Shorts

I noticed that there are a fair number of people on the web hand crafting photo maps and after a few months of research and design I released a map editor and publisher as the first product from the first startup I founded.

After reading about EST being released under a nice flexible license, I whipped up a quick applet remix based on the speeder reader work I'd seen by The Reading Lab. It took about 30 minutes, yet it has attracted more attention than my previous years of work. Go figure.

I drew a paper timeline of places I've lived and events in my life, but I kept erasing and redrawing. I made MoreMemory to allow me to rearrange events and zoom around in my timeline so that the details of my life remain fresh in my memory.

One sleepless night I wanted to hack up a few visuals of the SF Bay Area, so I built parsers for the US Census data and the USGS elevation files. Because it was slightly boring to encode the file formats in a machine readable form in order to autogenerate the parsers, I ended up posting them here and then later I threw in the parser code for only twice the price.

14 years, 1 month ago

Moon Font

While looking around for writing equivalents to the Dvorak keyboard, I discovered a font called Moon which is designed for raised letter print for blind people. Moon also happens to be very quick and beautiful in its own way, and I use it in my notebooks. I also used fontifier to create a Moon true type font.

TopFeeder provides daily email news reports, based on a list of RSS feeds. I designed and implemented an RSS crawler, a J2EE based web interface for managing personal lists of feeds, an RSS search engine, and a daily email service. You can browse and download the source code from the TopFeeder SourceForge project.

In 1945, Doctor Vannevar Bush published "As We May Think" which described the Memex, a personal information tool based on a process for rapidly processing microfilm. I researched the device and built a rough simulation of the user interface.

14 years, 8 months ago

Globe Widget

The Globe Widget uses an algorithm for a 1966 demonstration of the ARDS terminal to draw a globe. I ported it use Swing's double buffering, resizing, and antialiased lines.

15 years, 1 month ago

Subduction

One of the great times for gonzo hackery at PARC is during the month of December, when almost everyone leaves and most serious work is stopped. In 2001, Ian Smith, Mark Howard and I were the only people left in CSL and we took the opportunity to build a P2P file sharing system which had a protocol built around the idea that these systems have three types of users: Whales (the fanatic with 10,000 files and broadband), Groupers (friends of the Whale, with the occasional upload), and Pilot Fish (people who do nothing but take from the system). We built a set of clients and servers which supported all three roles and tried to minimize the negative effect of Pilot Fish while rewarding the Whales and Groupers with social capital. It was fun, but PARC (with its strict intellectual property rules) is a tough place to write software which you would like to see opened up for public use. It is possible, but for side projects the effort is often too great.

16 years, 2 months ago

Flannel

Flannel was an experiment in embedding computation and web services in email servers. When sending mail, a person could signal to their email server to take some action by attaching a URL file, which they dragged from the flannel web server pages. As the mail was processed by the server, the URL attachment would be read and called (via HTTP with certain headers and POST values) and the web server could reply with 0 or more items to include in the mail. Example services included "Attach a babelfish translation," "Notify me via phone if a reply is made," and "Post a copy to my blog."

16 years, 4 months ago

Digital Voices

A great researcher at PARC, Cristina Lopes, created an excellent process for sending information over sound waves using musical tones. I had great fun implementing a few of her algorithms in a Java toolkit, though people in adjoining offices quickly grew tired of the noises produced during development.

16 years, 8 months ago

i-drive Rendlets

My team combined a multi-terabyte database of metadata rich files, and roughly twenty Apache web servers, with our in-house XML+XSLT application service, Rendlets, to create shared photo albums, MP3 playlists, sideloading, and web hosting. Before struts arrived on the scene we had a scalable Java MVC web platform which recognized with varying toolsets the different roles people play in a web production group.